


Left Her Marks

by ivanolix



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, Canon - TV, Canon Het Relationship, F/M, Married Couple, Season/Series 04, Wordcount: 100-1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-29
Updated: 2010-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-20 21:44:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivanolix/pseuds/ivanolix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara has a moment of calm before another storm, but she doesn't like what she remembers</p>
            </blockquote>





	Left Her Marks

When Helo takes her to her ship (Demetrius), and her crew (volunteers, so he says), she isn’t really surprised to see Sam there. It crosses her mind that he’s standing there, shoulders back, eyes straight, like a professional. Like a pilot who knows his place. She’s not sure it’s a good look on him. She’s not sure he belongs in that uniform, not when he can thrive anywhere—everywhere—else.

As she passes down the line, she catches the bruise on his right temple, and remembers. It was the first time she had ever hit him. The cloudiness of it all is left behind in her cell, her mind focusing on purpose now, but she hasn’t forgotten hitting Sam in her need to reach the president.

Her face and body bear many marks from friends and colleagues; she’s never backed away from physicality, even when it’s more rage than frustration. And it’s not because of Momma, like Helo once said before she knocked him upside the head; she’s been hitting people since her dad was around and things were peaceful. Part of her has always liked the pain, and hitting is a good road to it.

But out of all the people she’s loved and hated or both, out of all of those who’ve crossed fists or other weapons with her, she’d never hit Sam. Not for lack of reasons, and there have been other methods. She’s thrown a bowl at his head after he kept on _talking_ in their first big argument on New Caprica. Smashed a bottle on the table in front of him when he just glowered, and that time it was what _started_ the yelling. She’s even pushed him around, and not always as a prelude to frakking that’s just rough and messy enough to remind her of...everything.

Never a strike, though. It took dying and rebirth without explanation to bring her to that line, and she crossed it, and she doesn’t like how that feels. Broken. Like she wasn’t supposed to be that kind of frakked up with him. Like in that one pistol-whip she erased some of the times they’d managed to stop the shouting matches and talk like (mostly) normal human beings. Like even if that’s just her messed up perception, she wants to fix it—but yet she doesn’t because she can’t care about that right now. Can’t care about anything but Earth, or she’ll lose everything.

She chooses to not hit Sam because he’s too precious to provoke like that. There’s no risk that he’ll break and leave her stranded, but that just means that all she can do is hurt him. And she won’t—she can’t—not like that. Not even now. Words will hide the fact that he is her soft spot, the place where she’s vulnerable, because she can snap at him until they all die out and it’ll look the same as hitting. But her secret is that she doesn’t think words can hurt Sam permanently, and one strike won’t do it either (it won’t happen again).

He has to know that. She and Sam have always played at pain, but the hurt was never the purpose. Earth is taking over her mind, and she can barely spare a thought once she’s walked past Sam and he’s out of sight.

But it niggles at her that she had absently thought of saying in the future that after twenty years of marriage, there had never been a strike between them. It won’t be true now, not just because she knows there isn’t a chance that they’ll live that long.

It niggles at her worst that she had ever thought of Sam like that. He’s probably still standing with the crew, at attention, just another soldier. He’s her husband, even though she hit him. And she doesn’t know where or why, but he turned into the husband that she never wanted to hurt. Maybe if they’ll just let her find frakking Earth, she can make sure he knows that.


End file.
